[TUHS] [SPAM] Re: Re: [SPAM] Re: Re: Hypothetical: Could MULTICS have been written in C, if available?

[Larry McVoy via TUHS]

On Wed, May 27, 2026 at 12:56:52PM -0700, Adam Thornton wrote:
> On Wed, May 27, 2026 at 11:01???AM Larry McVoy via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:
> 
> > I took a different approach, we hired excellent programmers
> > and our stuff worked.
> >
> >
> This is probably a COFF question, but I'm interested in your process for
> hiring excellent programmers.  CCing to COFF and I suggest we continue it
> there.

Strangely enough, a lot of the same stuff your current boss wrote up.
The technical part is pretty easy, the core of my team were all top 1%
programmers.  Those people tend to recognize that talent up front.

We had two compatibility tests and one question (that well over 90% of
programmers fail).

If we needed you to sweep the floors, would you?

We asked ourselves if the recruit passed the super market test.  If you
saw them at Safeway do you want to go talk to them or do you want to
hide in another isle?

The technical (sort of) question was from me and it had a lot to do with
the fact that we were a small team and I wasn't interested in managing a
large team:  Tell me about something that you built, at least 10 other
people have used it without contacting you other than to thank you.  By
"built" I mean you identified the problem, came up with a solution,
packaged it up, announced it on comp.sources.whatever (or hackernews
for you youngsters).  You did the README, the man pages, any web support
needed.  You wrote test cases.  You did *everything*.  No support staff.

I had an example that I did as a student, I wanted to have regexp version
of mv/cp.  I called them move.c and copy.c and did a shell function like so:

function mv {
        case "$1" in
        *=*) move $*;;
        *) /bin/mv $*
        esac
}

and then you could do

$ mv =.c =.c++	# bad example, in poor taste :-)

I wrote the code and docs and packaged them up into a shar file and
announced on comp.sources decades ago.

My example was delibrately choosen to be something simple.  Complexity was
not the point, completeness was.

Very, very few people passed this test.  I hired people who didn't but
I liked working with the people who did, better.  There is something
satisfying about working with someone who understands what "it's done"
actually means.

All the engineers interviewed every engineering candidate so other
folks may have had other questions.  I remember there being widespread
agreement on the sweep the floors thing and the supermarket thing.
I believe both of those came from Bill Moore (ZFS guy), he had gotten
them from other startups.

--lm